Image and Video Processing

Handout 1
Course Notes for Integrated Systems Design
Dr. A. C. Kokaram
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering,
University of Dublin Trinity College.
Contents
1 Introductory Remarks 3
1.1 The rise of the Digital Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1.1 The Hot (Research?) Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1.2 The big Research/Industrial Conferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.1.3 Useful Journals and Technical Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2 A start and Terminology 6
2.1 Matlab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3 Image Perception 7
3.1 Contrast/Intensity Sensitivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.2 Spatial Frequency Sensitivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.2.1 The meaning of spatial frequency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.2.2 Frequency Response of the HVS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.3 Colour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1
CONTENTS CONTENTS
3.3.1 Alternative Colour Spaces: YUV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.3.2 YIQ, YDbDr Colour Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.3.3 HSV Colour Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.4 Colour Sensitivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.5 Activity Masking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4 A Note on Compression 15
5 Impact on Digital Picture Formats 16
6 High Denition (HD) Formats 17
7 Image Evaluation 18
7.1 Subjective Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
7.2 Objective Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
8 Summary 21
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1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
1 Introduction and Course Scope
This course consists of 27 lectures which introduce the basics of image and video processing
including a working introduction to elements of image coding. The following will be covered
IMAGE ANALYSIS AND CODING
Human Visual Perception
2D Fourier Xform, 2D DCT
Basic Image Manipulation/Characterisation: Histograms, Filtering, Overlapped Pro-
cessing
Simple Compression Example [Haar Transform]
DCT and JPEG
Filterbanks and Wavelets
VIDEO ANALYSIS AND CODING
Video Formats: CCIR Rec 601, Composite Video, Interlacing
Sampling in space/time
Motion Estimation (Image Centric): Direct Search, Optic Flow, Multiresolution meth-
ods
Video Filtering (Motion compensated and non-motion compensated)
Changing the sampling rate: Deinterlacing/Upsampling
Basics of MPEG Schemes
There are two main references for this course [1, 2]. The coursework involves exercises
using both Matlab and written material. The overall goal is to allow the student to diagnose
problems in the design and implementation of video and image processing systems such as
MPEGx codec chipsets and turnkey visual consumer/broadcast devices.
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1.1 The rise of the Digital Image 1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
1.1 The rise of the Digital Image
Work in Digital Image Processing (DIP) began as early as the 1960s with NASA programme
of space exploration. Pictures were broadcast (painfully slowly) pixel by pixel and sometimes
the colour/intensity map of the image was created by hand by simply colouring in a square on
a very large sheet of paper with the relevant colour. Digital computers were used to correct for
the blurring caused by lenses and enhancement techniques were developed for improving the
picture detail. It is interesting to note that the rise of DIP follows closely the development
of picture reproduction and display devices
1
e.g. laser (dry ink) printing, dye sublimation
printing, wax transfer and now ink jet printing.
The last 5 years has seen an explosion in the availability of digital visual devices and hence
digital visual media. Digital Television set top boxes are now available free from SKY in
Ireland, SKY has been broadcasting DTV for about 3 years now. DVD (Digital Video Disk)
sales have outstripped CD sales at a comparable point in their releases. PDAs (Personal
Digital Assistants) like Compaq Imode, HP Journada, Visor, PalmPilot now seek to include
camera add ons as well as wireless. WebCams have been available for a long time, and Digital
Cameras are getting better. Medical analysis is now exclusively in the digital domain as it is
much easier to manipulate and enhance the images for diagnosis. Words like JPEG, MPEG,
AVI, Graphics seem in as common use by under 20s. Special fx at the movies are now the
norm.
These devices and media all require the design of systems which are growing increasingly
complex, both from the point of view of data management and data processing itself. Image
and Video compression in particular are key technologies that have enabled consumer devices
since the media data rate would be otherwise too large for practical design. The designer
needs to understand the compromises which must be made in handling visual media, and the
key concepts which make that handling possible in the rst place. That is what this course
is about.
1.1.1 The Hot (Research?) Areas
The proliferation of digital capture devices and consumer video equipment has fuelled new
industrial research trends as users are exposed to these novel devices and media.
MPEG4/H.264 is more error-resilient than MPEG2 and gives better image quality at
the same bitrate. This implies it is suitable for Wireless Video in particular, and Internet
Streaming from the point of view of standardisation. MPEG4 though, needs high level
1
Why do DIP if not many people can see the results?
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1.1 The rise of the Digital Image 1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
analysis tools for building the encoder and more error correction at the decoder in real
situations. Video Object Segmentation and Error Concealment important.
Digital Cinema allows the motion picture houses more control, faster distribution and
better quality reproduction. Compression is a serious issue here as each frame is very
high resolution e.g. 2048 1152 3 = 6.75Mb = 168MB/sec !
It is very very hard to search digital media in the same way that search engines can
search text for instance. A movie, or a photograph means dierent things to dierent
people. It is possible to attach keywords to media stream to describe it, but these
keywords only describe what is in the mind of the cataloguer.
Thus we may wish to access photos from a nature reserve (for instance) which show
wildlife hunt chases, but no one had bothered to index their photos like this at the time.
Is it possible to design image processing routines which can extract this information by
understanding the picture content?
Video Editors are swamped with clips which they need to compile into movies, and more
and more amateurs make movies as cheap DV (Digital Consumer Video Tape) devices
become available
2
. How does one make this task simple?
Automated Content Analysis/Management/Retrieval has become the BIGGEST
multimedia research area in the last 5 years. MPEG7 addresses a mechanism for de-
scribing content which could be related to this idea.
Broadcasters are starved for content despite available media channels (DTV, DVD,
Internet Streaming). Archives hold that content. But it is in bad condition and needs
re-touching or restoration. Film and Video Restoration is becoming more important.
Noise reduction of video/lm allows better compression. Several companies now oer
cleaning services for DVD.
Digital media is too easy to copy and thus redistribute without the manufacturers
authority. It is possible to digitally watermark such media to allow it to be traced.
Digital Watermarking is a key component in security measures for the protection of
digital media
3
Seminal work in this area was performed at the EEE Dept., TCD around
1996.
Online video processing throught the www is becoming of incresing interest. This is
being pushed by availability of decent broadband and continually better mobile phones.
2
Blair Witch Project, BBC location broadcasts/documentaries, Real-Life Docudramas
3
Although by itself it is useless. Standards play an important role here, as does security key generation
and validation.
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2 A START AND TERMINOLOGY
Conversion and Scaling is required to convert between HD and SD and Mobile phone
pictures. Doing this well is important for Flat Screen TV technology as well as crazy
people who want to watch Mobile phone footage on their 40inch HD plasma display.
1.1.2 The big Research/Industrial Conferences
For industrials and researchers alike a number of important conferences have arisen in the
last 10 years which are excellent venues to observe the state of the art in new developments.
Here are a few:
International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP): Annual
(In 2008 : Vegas). The biggest Digital Signal Processing conference www.icassp2001.org:
Deals with everything from Filter Design/Implementation to Video Networking and
Compression
International Conference in Image Processing (ICIP), Annual (In 2008: ) Deals with
all things image and video. The biggest image and video processing conference.
NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), US Based Industrial Broadcaster Confer-
ence (Video, Audio). (Vegas)
IBC (International Broadcast Convention), European Based like NAB (Amsterdam)
1.1.3 Useful Journals and Technical Publications
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Circuits and Systems for Video Technology,
Multimedia, Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Signal Processing, Signal Pro-
cessing Letters
Computer Vision and Image Processing (CVGIP) (Academic Press)
EURASIP Signal Processing
EURASIP Image Communication
2 A start and Terminology
Digital pictures are made up of individual picture elements called Pixels. In this course we
will abbreviate this to pel. A digital image is typically made up of a number of lines each
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2.1 Matlab 3 IMAGE PERCEPTION
containing a number of pixels. A PAL (European) television frame consists of 576 lines each
having 720 pixels.
In greyscale images, at each pixel site, the intensity of a pel is given by some number,
typically 8 bit for broadcast applications and 12 bit or more for medical applications. Thus
0 is black and 255 is bright white.
An image is a 2D function of space, and a Digital image can be represented as a matrix
of numbers. The coordinate of a particular site will be denoted [h, k] where h is the line
number and k is the pixel in that line. This is the usual Matlab notation for 2D matrices.
The intensity of a pixel in a grey scale image at a site [h, k] for instance will be dened as
I(x) where x = [h, k] (a position vector). Thus if the intensity at x
1
= [5, 4] is 156, then
I(x
1
) = 156.
2.1 Matlab
In matlab you will be using images as matrices. Remember that if A is an image (matrix) of
size 576 720 then A(:,20) is a column vector with 576 elements consisting of the 576 pixels
along the 20th column, and A(100,:) is a row vector with 720 elements consisting of the 720
pixels along the 100th row.
Colour images are stored as 3 planes of data A(:,:,3). Get used to converting from the
uchar default data type (8bits) for images read in with imread() to double data type for
doing arithmetic on the pictures.
When you cant remember a command call in Matlab, use help <command name>.
3 The Human Visual System (HVS) and Perception
Understanding the importance of human perception of picture material is crucial since the
result of any processing is to be presented to a human and that entity is decidedly non-linear
in its perception of light and shade. In fact it is through the perceptual characteristics of
the HVS that compression schemes can achieve much of their performance. Furthermore,
all image communication industries are necessarily obsessed with maintaining image quality.
By modelling the HVS quantitatively, it is possible to design objective models which assess
the perceptual quality of processed or received images thus allowing a DTV broadcaster
for instance to verify automatically that the transmitted images are achieving the quality
required by the governing body for the media. Issues like Quality of Service (QoS) over video
communication networks can be handled much more readily if such quantitative mechanisms
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3.1 Contrast/Intensity Sensitivity 3 IMAGE PERCEPTION
for assessing picture quality were available.
Work in the measurement of the HVS has been conducted by Visual Psychologists since
the 1920s [3] and it was in the early 1970s that Netravali [4] and others began to exploit these
ideas in the design of image compression schemes. There are a few broad ideas which deserve
consideration Contrast/Intensity Sensitivity, Frequency Sensitivity and Perceptual Masking.
First of all it should be noted that the measurement of the HVS response to dierent
stimuli is notoriously dicult
4
. This is because it is dicult to generate the conditions under
which the human subject is consistently able to separate his higher level visual processing (e.g.
Thats a computer monitor Im looking at, Who cares about that spot anyway?, I know
I am looking for circles so lets just spot circles.) from the low level image processing which
goes on inside the visual cortex (e.g. spatial frequency response cells, colour receptors etc).
Lighting conditions and the luminance (in Candela/m
2
) function of the screen used (emitted
light energy as a function of greyscale) are crucial and must be strictly controlled.
3.1 Contrast/Intensity Sensitivity
Webers law relates the perceived brightness of an object to the brightness of its background.
The law can be derived by measuring the Just Noticeable Dierence between two visual
stimuli. A psychovisual experiment to measure this is as shown in gure 1. Consider a
foreground object with intensity I
f
and a background with intensity I
b
. We can dene the
threshold I as the intensity dierence I = I
f
I
b
at which the foreground object is just
visible (with a 50% probability) by a human. Webers law states that I/I = k where k is a
constant (about 0.02). For a relatively large range of intensity this law holds and implies that
for a bright background a large intensity dierence is needed to resolve a foreground object
than if the background were dark.
Practical use for this idea can be found in quantisation for compression and noise reduction
for restoration. Webers law implies that noise is less visible in the bright regions than in the
dark regions of a picture. Thus less noise reduction (coarser quantization) can be tolerated
in bright regions than in dark regions.
3.2 Spatial Frequency Sensitivity
Figure 2 shows a staircase image intensity prole. The greyscale values are constant in bands
across the image. However, the HVS perceives that each vertical stripe looks brighter on the
left and darker on the right. This is an eect known as Mach banding. It is as a direct
4
And therefore extremely interesting
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3.2 Spatial Frequency Sensitivity 3 IMAGE PERCEPTION
I
I + I
I + I
I
Figure 1: The setup for a psychovisual experiment to test Webers law.
50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
140 160 180 200 220 240
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
110
120
G
r
e
y
s
c
a
le
(

)
a
n
d
S
e
n
s
itiv
ity
(

)
Column
Figure 2: Left: Staircase pattern of greyscale showing the Mach banding eect. Right: Cross
section of the greyscale for a subset of columns (black), and the result of ltering with a low
pass lter having a SINC response (red). The low pass lter eect approximates the HVS
response: each at band is perceived due to the eect as if the left hand side were brighter
than the right hand side. Note that the lter response has been slightly shifted vertically so
that it is more easily viewed.
result of spatial ltering in the visual cortex. This can be partially understood through the
eect of a spatial lter on the image (also shown in gure 2). In the horizontal direction a
low pass lter (with a symmetric impulse response) will cause undershoot and overshoot at
sharp edges, hence a distortion of the perceptual quality of the edge.
3.2.1 The meaning of spatial frequency
It will become necessary to understand what spatial frequency means from the HVS perspec-
tive. The units are in cycles per degree or cycles per radian. The underlying understanding
is that pictures are being formed on the retina of the eye, and it is there that the visual
processing begins. Thus frequencies should be measured in terms of their relationship to the
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3.2 Spatial Frequency Sensitivity 3 IMAGE PERCEPTION
degrees of arc subtended by one luminance cycle on the retina.
CCIR
5
recommendations 500 require viewing at 5 times the screen height. At this distance
the viewable height of a monitor h would subtend tan
1
(1/5) = 0.1974 rad or 11.3 degrees.
Consider a monitor set at 1024 768 pixel resolution. This implies that the resolution of a
pixel on the retina is about = 11.3/768 = 0.0147 degrees. Thus the sampling frequency of
the screen is 1/ = 68 cycles/degree (pixels/degree). A vertical sinusoidal grating having a
frequency of .05 cycles per pixel on the screen would therefore have a frequency of 1/(0.05
0.0147) = 0.3 cycles per degree on the retina.
It is the cycles per degree which matter for the HVS since it is at the retina that processing
starts. This explains why the perception of images depends on viewing distance and thus
why International Committees dene the viewing distance for regulating the measurement of
picture quality.
3.2.2 Frequency Response of the HVS
The frequency response of the HVS is shown in gure 3. It shows the sensitivity of the HVS
to stimuli with varying frequencies. Essentially there is a bandpass behaviour, the HVS is
more sensitive to midfrequencies than low or high frequencies and is least sensitive to high
frequencies.
The eect is demonstrated in gure 3. A sinusoidal grating is shown which increases with
frequency horizontally and decreases in intensity vertically. The visibility of j.n.d. boundary
between the bright and dark vertical lines directly measure the readers Modulation Transfer
Function (modulated by the printing/photocopying process.). If there was no dependence on
spatial frequency the boundary between visibility and non-visibility would be a straight line.
Note that the HVS sensitivity is orientation dependent with maximum sensitivity for
vertical and horizontal orientations. Other orientations are at most 3dB o the peak hence
the frequency response can be approximated as isotropic.
Important features are
Maximum frequency sensitivity occurs at around 5 cycles/degree. This corresponds to
striped patterns with a period of about 1.8 mm at a distance of 1 m ( arms length)
There is very little response above 100 cycles per degree which corresponds to a stripe
width of 0.17 mm at 1m. This implies about 1800 pels per line on a computer display.
SVGA of 1024 768 is a little more than half of this. Laptop displays have a pel size
5
A regulatory body
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3.3 Colour 3 IMAGE PERCEPTION
Figure 3: Left: Contrast sensitivity of the HVS. Horizontal axis represents the frequency of an
alternating pattern of parallel stripes with sinusoidally varying intensity. The vertical scale
shows the contrast sensitivity of the HVS which is the ratio of the maximum visible range
of intensities to the minimum discernible peak-to-peak intensity variation at the specied
frequency. Right: Sinusoidal grating for demonstrating HVS Frequency response.
of 0.3 mm but are pleasing to view because of the sharpness of the pixels and the lack
of icker.
Sensitivity to luminance drops o at low spatial frequencies, showing that we are not
good at estimating absolute luminance levels as long as they do not change with time.
The luminance sensitivity to temporal uctuations (icker) dos not fall o at low spatial
frequencies.
3.3 Colour
The HVS perceives colour using receptors (cones) in the retina which correspond to three
broad colour channels in the region of red, green and blue. [ROYGBIV] ([5] page 61).
Other colours are perceived as combinations of RGB and thus monitors use RGB to form
almost any perceivable colour by controlling the relative intensities of R, G, and B light
sources. Therefore electronic representation of colour images require the representation of
three intensities (R G B) at each pixel site.
The numerical values used for these intensities are usually chosen such that equal incre-
ments in value result in approximately equal apparent increases in brightness. In practise
this means that the numerical value is approximately proportional to the log of the true light
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3.3 Colour 3 IMAGE PERCEPTION
intensity (energy of the wave). This is another statement of Webers law. These numerical
values will be referred to as intensities in the rest of the course as it is convenient to refer to
a subjectively linear scale.
3.3.1 Alternative Colour Spaces: YUV
The eye is much more sensitive to luminance (brightness) than to colour changes. Usually
even if we remove all the colour from a picture, it is still intelligible using greyscale only. Thus
black and white TV was acceptable for a long time until colour technology became suciently
cheap (1952). The luminance of a pel Y may be calculated as
Y = 0.3R + 0.6G+ 0.1B (1)
These are only approximate values, and dierent references quote slightly dierent values e.g.
0.299R + 0.587G+ 0.114B.
The YUV transformation mapping was used in the 1950s so that those with Black and
White TV sets could still view colour TV signals.
RGB representations are usually dened so that if R = G = B the pel is some shade of
grey. Thus if Y = R = G = B in these cases, the coecients used in equation 1 should sum
to unity.
The chrominance of a pel is dened by U and V as below (for PAL
6
).
U = 0.5(B Y )
V = 0.625(R Y ) (2)
Grey pels will always have U = V = 0
The transformation between RGB and YUV colour spaces is linear and can be expressed
as follows

Y
U
V

= C

R
G
B

Where C =

0.3 0.6 0.1

0.15 0.3 0.45
0.4375 0.3750 0.0625

(3)
6
Phase Alternate Line: the European Colour TV format
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3.3 Colour 3 IMAGE PERCEPTION
The inverse relationship is derived by taking the inverse of the transformation matrix C
on the right of equation 3 to give

R
G
B

= C
1

Y
U
V

Where C
1
=

1 0 1.6
1 0.3333 0.8
1 2 0

(4)
The allowed range of Y is from 16 to 255 16, U, V range between 128 and so are
shifted by 128 to allow storage as an 8 bit number.
3.3.2 YIQ, YDbDr Colour Space
The US standard for video NTSC (National Television Systems Committee)
7
uses a slightly
dierent transformation into a space known as YIQ in which
C =

0.299 0.587 0.114

0.596 0.275 0.321
0.212 0.523 0.311

(5)
[Y Db Dr] is used for Secam (Sequential Couleur a Memoire) which is employed in France,
Russia. Here Db = 3.059U and Dr = 2.169V .
3.3.3 HSV Colour Space
The YUV representation is used for Digital TV and Digital Media communications in general,
however it does not create a fully orthogonal colour space w.r.t. perception. A more useful
colour space to operate in from the point of view of perception in particular is the HSV :
Hue Saturation and Intensity (or Value) space. This space describes a colour in terms of
its Brightness (Intensity or Value), its Hue (its redness, greenness etc) and its Saturation
(deep red, light red etc). The dierence between HSI and HSV colorspaces is the intensity
calculation.
Whereas the RGB colour space can be thought of as a cube with the three principal axes
being R,G,B; the HSV space is a cone with the vertical axis being Brightness (I), Saturation
(S) varies with the radius, and Hue (H) varies around the circumference.
7
Otherwise known as Never The Same Colour
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3.4 Colour Sensitivity 3 IMAGE PERCEPTION
For HSV, the transformation from RGB is more complicated than for YUV. Hue has a
range for 0 to 360 degrees, S has a range from 0 to 1 and V has a range from 0 to 1. Matlab
has an HSV2RGB function which you can experiment with, and the lecture will include a
demonstration using color wheels for which the m script is available.
See [1, 5, 6] for more information.
3.4 Colour Sensitivity
Figure 3 also shows the sensitivity of the eye to Chrominance (U,V) components.
The maximum chrominance sensitivity is much lower than the maximum luminance
sensitivity.
The chrominance sensitivities fall o above 1 cycle/ degree thus requiring a much lower
spatial bandwidth than luminance.
This illustrates why it is better to use the YUV domain for video communication since
the eye is less sensitive to U and V. Hence the U and V components may be sampled at a
lower rate than Y and may be quantised more coarsely. U and V also tend to be much more
smooth functions than Y and this adds to their compressibility.
3.5 Activity Masking
In general the sensitivity of the HVS to any image feature changes depending on the character
of the background. Therefore edges for instance are less visible in textured areas than against
a uniform background. Thus the contrast sensitivity to a given pattern is reduced by the
presence of other patterns in the same region. This is called activity masking.
This is a complicated subject and the masking eect depends on the similarity between
the given pattern and the background activity. In general, however, the higher the variance
of pels in a small region (typically 8 to 16 pels across) the lower the contrast sensitivity.
Thus compression schemes which adapt quantisation to local image activity achieve better
compression rates than those using uniform quantisation. Furthermore image enhancement
techniques which allow for masking eects generally show less visible damage to the picture
than would otherwise be the case.
A good example of this is in noise reduction. Typically, noise reduction causes blurring
of edges and good noise reducers achieve a compromise between this blurring and reducing
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4 A NOTE ON COMPRESSION
the noise level. However, by allowing for the masking eect of noise by edges and texture,
more noise can be left in textured and edge regions than in other areas of the image yielding
a noise reduced, but perceptually sharper image.
However, it is very dicult to allow for masking eects quantitatively in image analy-
sis/enhancement tasks as the perceptual distortion measure can complicate the analysis and
implementation.
4 A Note on Compression
Image data is typically of a high bandwidth. A typical raw PAL TV signal will require
20 MB/sec for transmission. A single Digital Cinema format frame is 7MB large! The
task of image compression is to reduce the amount of data used to store an image without
objectionable degradation in the percieved quality of the image. The term objectionable
depends of course on the use of the image data. Sometimes fast/real time transmission is
more important than image quality e.g. video over wireless. Other times quality is paramount
as in Digital Cinema and DTV. To make matters more complicated the same image shown
in dierent formats looks quite dierent e.g. when one converts from one DTV format to
another, degradations in the conversion do not show up on television sets, but if the same
image is used for creating a Digital Cinema production [lm format ads created from TV ads]
then the degrdations are very noticeable.
Image compression is of vital importance for communications and media storage. There
is a growing demand for IC designs that implement the core elements of image compression
systems, in particular for low power and low memory applications like PDAs and Mobile
phones.
Image compression is possible because of the nature of images and the development of
ecient coding techniques. The three enabling ideas are listed as follows.
1. There is alot of statistical redundancy in images. For instance, in local image regions
say 8 8 blocks, the data tends to be at or typically homogenous much of the
time. This redundancy can be removed without aecting the image substantially, thus
reducing the amount of data to be stored.
2. The HVS response to image stimuli implies that one can introduce artefacts into
images without them being seen. The colour demonstration accompanying the lecture
illustrated this idea with colour subsampling. Thus techniques that remove statistical
redundancy can apply that concept heavily in regions where the resulting defects will
not be noticed. This further reduces the image data to be stored.
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5 IMPACT ON DIGITAL PICTURE FORMATS
4:2:0
4:1:1 4:2:2
Figure 4: Sampling structures used for colour digital video formats. Luminance samples are
black dots, colour samples are indicated by red circles.
3. Ecient coding techniques can be used to represent any data as a more compact
stream of digits. This technology can be used both for compression and error-resilience.
The course will elaborate on image compression technology after some fundamental image
processing concepts are introduced.
5 Impact on Digital Picture Formats
In a digital picture le, picture information is sampled spatially and perhaps temporally and
also the resulting pixel intensities are quantised. CCD imagers provide a natural mechanism
for spatial and temporal sampling and it is typical to use 8 bit quantisation in all digital
video data formats. Higher sampling rates and smaller quantisation steps are used for medical
images in which 12 bit quantisation is sometimes used. The Film and HD Broadcast markets
are beginning now to use 16bit quantisation.
Digital video data is represented as three separate component data streams: RGB or
YUV. Because of the subjectively lower sensitivity of humans to colour, colour information is
typically sampled at a lower rate than the intensity information. When the colour information
is downsampled by a factor of 2 horizontally from the full resolution intensity image, the
picture sampling structure is called 4:2:2. When the colour information is sampled by a
factor of 2 horizontally and vertically the sampling is called 4:2:0. The 4:4:4 sampling structure
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6 HIGH DEFINITION (HD) FORMATS
represents video in which the colour components of the signal are sampled at the same rate as
the luminance signal. 4:1:1 sampling yields 1 colour sample for every 4 horizontal luminance
samples. Figure 4 shows the spatial arrangement of these sampling structures.
There are several digital video formats dened by the CCIR Recommendation 601. These
are indicated in the table below.
Format Total Active MB/sec
Resolution Resolution
CCIR 601 30 frames/sec, 4:3 Aspect Ratio, 4:2:2, NTSC
QCIF 214 131 176 120 1.27
CIF 429 262 352 240 5.07
Full 858 525 720 485 20.95
CCIR 601 25 frames/sec, 4:3 Aspect Ratio, 4:2:2, PAL
QCIF 216 156 176 144 1.27
CIF 432 312 352 288 5.07
Full 864 625 720 576 20.74
The CIF and QCIF formats are approximately 2 : 1 and 4 : 1 downsampled (in both
horizontal and vertical) directions from the full resolution picture sizes. Note that despite the
dierences in picture resolution between NTSC and PAL, the data bandwidth is approximately
the same. This is due to the dierence in frame rates. In modern mobile phones, the CMOS
imagers are increasingly sophisticated and will soon capture 640 480 pictures. The LG
ViewTY already does 120 frames per second (fps)! Currently most video over mobile phones
is in QCIF format. CIF is the format used for video taken with still picture cameras, while DV
Camcorders operate at Full resolution. See Figure 5 for a visual appreciation of the relative
sizes of the pictures.
The data bandwidth required for these video streams are all on the order of MB/sec. Thus
the successful transmission of digital video relies heavily on compression mechanisms and ul-
timately on the standardisation of compression schemes. This is what the MPEG committees
worked on from about 1985-2000. A discussion of digital video formats is therefore not com-
plete without a discussion of digital video compression standards, however this complicated
topic is left for the end of this series of lectures.
6 High Denition (HD) Formats
There are two principal formats 1920 1080 and 1280 720 both at 16:9 aspect ratio. These
come in dierent avours : 1080i, 1080p, 720i, 720p. The suxes stand for interlaced (i) and
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7 IMAGE EVALUATION
1920
x
1080
2048x1556
720
x
576
320
x
240
Figure 5: From small to large : Approximately CIF, SD (PAL), HD (1080p) and Digital Film
Picture Sizes.
progressive (p) and refer to the scan pattern used in recording and displaying the picture. See
Figure 7 and 6 for interlaced and progressive scan patterns. A more detailed discussion about
interlaced and progressive video will emerge later in the course. 720p is brodcast at 23.976,
24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60 fps while 1080p is broadcast at 23.976, 24, 29.97, 30 fps (in theory).
This is why an HD set top box is dierent from an SD set to pbox.
See http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/UnderstandingHDFormats.aspx#theinfamoustable3
for more information.
7 Image Evaluation
The idea of any kind of signal processing is to achieve some kind of desired eect on the
percieved information content in the signal. In image compression, the requirement is to
reduce the amount of data required to represent the image without signicant degradation. In
image enhancement and restoration the idea is to process the data to improve illumination,
or to remove defects like noise or Dirt on a lm. A mechanism for assessing the damage done
to the observed picture is important to evaluate the quality of the processed output.
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7.1 Subjective Assessment 7 IMAGE EVALUATION
Figure 6: Progressive (Sequential) TV
scanning
Figure 7: Interlaced TV Scanning
7.1 Subjective Assessment
The CCIR
8
recommendations 500-3 issued in 1986 a scale for subjective measurement adapted
from early work by Bell Labs.
1. Impairment is not noticeable
2. Impairment is just noticeable
3. Impairment is denitely noticeable but not objectionable
4. Impairment is objectionable
5. Impairment is extremely objectionable
Using this system, human subjects are asked to rank observed (processed) images in
terms of this 5 point scale. Collating results from such experiments gives some quantitative
measurement of the subjective perception of the images.
This process is tedious and dicult, requiring many participants and many reformulations
of the order in which the images are presented.
Ideally some automated mechanism for assigning a numerical value to the percieved quality
of the image is required. But as the above discussions on the HVS show, it is dicult to
quantify all the aspects of visual perception. A good recent eort at doing this was presented
in 1993 [7].
8
Now ITU: international Telecommunications Union
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7.2 Objective Assessment 7 IMAGE EVALUATION
7.2 Objective Assessment
Letting the desired image be I(h, k) and the result of processing be the image

I(h, k), it
is possible to employ simple error based schemes as an alternative to subjective evaluation.
Thus dening an error as
e(h, k) =

I(h, k) I(h, k) (6)
allows the derivation of some simple measures for how close the processed image is to some
ideal I(h, k).
In a compression example for instance,

I(h, k) would be the image resulting after the
original I(h, k) is compressed and then decoded. Lossless compression would imply that
e(h, k) is 0 everywhere in the image, and lossy compression would imply that e(h, k) was
non-zero.
In image restoration, we do not kow I(h, k) and the idea is to process some observed image
to yield

I(h, k). The question then is How good is the restoration really? Of course we do
not have I(h, k) in the rst place, but that discussion is left for another time
9
.
A number of simple measures can be generated to measure the observed error as follows.
The Mean Squared Error (MSE) is
MSE =
1
NM

x
e(x)
2
(7)
where the image size is N rows by M columns, the sum is over all the sites in the image,
and e(x) = e([h, k]). Thus the MSE is the mean of the squared error values across the entire
image. In some cases, the Mean Absolute Error is used as follows.
MAE =
1
NM

x
|e(x)| (8)
The Signal to Noise ratio is another popular objective measure and it has units of
Decibels (dB).
SNR = 10 log 10
1
NM

x
I(x)
2
MSE
(9)
This is a ratio between the signal power, measured as the sum squared intensities in the
original image I, and the noise power measured as the MSE of the error, e.
A more popular version of the SNR used widely in image compression is the Peak SNR
this is the log of the ratio between the peak signal (image) power and the noise power. It is
also measured in dB.
PSNR = 10 log 10
255
2
MSE
(10)
9
The restoration problem is called ill-posed for this reason.
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8 SUMMARY
where it is assumed that the image is stored as 8 bit pixels in which case the peak value at a
pixel site is 255.
Unfortunately, these error measures do not align well with the Human perception of im-
ages. It is a good rule of thumb however that in comparing images using these measures,
large dierences in objective measurements do tend to imply similar dierences in human
perception of the images. However when the dierences between the same objective measure
on several images are small then it is no longer the case that the dierences would imply
similar perceptual evaluations. A demonstration during the lecture will explain this more
clearly.
8 Summary
This handout has covered the following ideas
1. Digital Image processing is more relevant with the increasing use of Digital Visual Media
2. Images are 2-D functions of space
3. Human visual perception is important for understanding what eects of a processing
system will be visible.
4. The perception of image features depends on their brightness, frequency and the masking
eects of the features nearby.
5. There are several dierent colour spaces for representing a colour digitally. YUV and
HSV have applications in DTV and Image Analysis respectively
6. The HVS is less sensitive to colour than brightness (luminance)
7. Perceptual masking is one key to understanding why image compression is possible
8. Automated picture quality assessment is growing in importance. This is dicult because
it is dicult to model the HVS and so assign to any arbitrary image an absolute measure
of quality.
9. CCIR Rec 500 proposes a 5 point subjective evaluation scheme which is one of the
standards adopted by the DTV industry.
10. Objective image evaluation is convenient and MSE, MAE, SNR, PSNR are all used to
assess the performance of image processing systems. It is understood that the compar-
isions using these measures may not follow human perception of the same images.
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REFERENCES REFERENCES
References
[1] Jae S. Lim. Two-Dimensional Signal and Image Processing. Prentice-Hall, 1990.
[2] A. Murat Tekalp. Digital Video Processing. Prentice Hall, 1995.
[3] S. Hecht. The visual discrimination of intensity and the weber-fechner law. General
Phisiology, 1924.
[4] A. N. Netravali and B. Prasada. Adaptive quantisation of picture signals using spatial
masking. In Processings of the IEEE, pages 536548, April 1977.
[5] A.K. Jain. Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing. Prentice Hall, 1989.
[6] Keith Jack. Video Demystied. Hightext, 1993.
[7] A. A. Webster, C. T. Jones, and M. H. Pinson. An objective video quality assessment
system based on human perception. In Proceedings of Human Vision, Visual Processing
and Digital Display IV, volume 1913, pages 1526. SPIE, 1993.
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